Tim Urban: Elon Musk, Neuralink, AI, Aliens, and the Future of Humanity | Lex Fridman Podcast #264

If you read a half hour a night, the calculation I came to is that you can read a thousand books in 50 years.

All of the components are there to engineer intimate experiences.

Extraterrestrial life is a true mystery, the most tantalizing mystery of all.

How many humans need to disappear for us to be completely lost? The following is a conversation with Tim Urban, author and illustrator of the amazing blog called Wait, but why? This is the Lex Friedman podcast to support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Tim Urban. You wrote a Wait, but why? Blog post about the big and the small. From the observable universe to the atom, what world do you find most mysterious or beautiful? The very big or the very small?

The very small seems a lot more mysterious. And the very big, I feel like we kind of understand. I mean, not the very, very big, not the. Not the multiverse, if there is a multiverse, not anything outside of the observable universe, but the very small. I think we really have no idea what's going on or very much less idea, but I find that. So I think the small is more mysterious, but I think the big is sexier. I just cannot get enough of the bigness of space and the farness of stars, and it just continually blows my mind.

I mean, we still, the vastness of the observable universe has the mystery that we don't know what's out there. We know how it works. Perhaps like general relativity can tell us how the, the movement of bodies works, how they're born, all that kind of things. But like, how many civilizations are out there? How many. Like, what are the weird things that are out there?

Oh, yeah, life. Well, extraterrestrial life is a true mystery, the most tantalizing mystery of all. But that's like our size. So that's. Maybe it's that the actual, the big and the small are really cool, but it's actually the things that are potentially our size that are the most tantalizing.

Potentially. Our size is probably the key word.

Yeah. I mean, I wonder how small intelligent life could get. Probably not that small. And I assume that there's a limit that you're not going to. I mean, you might have like a whale, blue whale sized intelligent being. That would be kind of cool. But I feel like we're in the range of order of magnitude smaller and bigger than us for life. But maybe not. Maybe you could have some giant life form. Just seems like, I don't know, there's got to be some reason that anything intelligent between kind of like a little tiny rodent or finger monkey up to a blue whale on this planet. I don't know, maybe when you change the gravity and other things.

Well, you could think of life as a thing of self assembling organisms. And they just get bigger and bigger and bigger. There's no such thing as a human being. A human being is made up of a bunch of tiny organisms working together. And we somehow envision that as one entity because it has consciousness. But maybe it's just organisms on top of organisms. Organisms all the way down, turtles all the way down. So like Earth can be seen as an organism for people, for alien species that's very different. Like, why is the human the fundamental entity that is living? And then everything else is just either a collection of humans or components of humans.

I think of it kind of as if you think about, I think of like an emergence elevator. And so you've got an ant is on one floor and then the ant colony is a floor above. Or maybe there's even units within the colony that's one floor above and the full colony is two floors above. And to me, I think that it's the colony that is the closest to being the animal. It's like the individual thing that competes with others while the individual ants are like cells in the animal's body. We are more like a colony in that regard. But the humans are weird because we kind of, I think of it if emergence happens in an emergence tower where you've got kind of, you know, as I said, cells and then humans and communities and societies. Ants are very specific. You know, the individual ants are always cooperating with each other for the sake of the colony. So the colony is this unit that is, that is the competitive unit. Humans can kind of go. We take the elevator up and down emergence tower. Psychologically, sometimes we are individuals that, that are competing with other individuals. And that's where our mindset is. And then other times we get in this crazy zone, a protest or a sporting event, and you're just chanting and screaming and doing the same hand motions with all these other people and you feel like one, you feel like one, and you'd sacrifice yourself. That's soldiers. So our brains can kind of psychologically go up and down this elevator in an interesting way.

Yeah, I wonder how much of that is just the narrative we tell ourselves. Maybe we are just like an ant colony. We're just collaborating always. Even in our stories of individualism, of the freedom of the individual, this kind of isolation, lone man on an island kind of thing. We're actually all part of this giant network of maybe one of the things that makes humans who we are is probably deeply social, the ability to maintain not just a single human intelligence, but like a collective intelligence. And so. So this feeling like individual is just because we woke up at this level of the hierarchy. So we make it special. But we very well could be just part of the Ann colony. This whole conversation. I'm either going to be doing a Shakespearean analysis of your Twitter, your writing, or very specific statements that you've made. So you've written answers to a mailbag of questions. The questions were amazing, the ones you've chosen, and your answers are amazing. So on this topic of the big and the small, somebody asked, are we bigger than we are small or smaller than we are big? Who's asking these questions? This is really good. You have amazing fans. Okay, so where do we sit at this level of the very small to the very big?

So are we bigger or are we small? Are we bigger than we are small? I think it depends what we're asking here. So if we're talking about the biggest thing that we kind of can talk about without just imagining is the observable universe, the Hubble sphere, and that's about 10 to the 26th meters in diameter. The smallest thing we talk about is a Planck length, but you could argue that that's kind of an imaginary thing. But that's 10 to the negative 35. Now we're about. Conveniently about 10 to the 1, not. Not quite 10 to the 0. We're about 10 to the 0 meters long. So we're right. And so it's easy because you can just look and say, okay, well, for example, atoms are like 10 to the negative 15th or 10 to the negative 16th meters across. Right. If you go 10 to the 15th or 10 to the 16th, which is right, that's now. So an atom to us is us to this. You get to like nebulas, smaller than a galaxy and bigger than the biggest star. So we're right in between nebula and an atom. Now, if you want to go down to quark level, you might be able to get up to galaxy level. When you go up to the observable universe, you're getting down on the small side to things that we, I think, are mostly theoretically imagining are there and hypothesizing are there. So I think as far as real world objects that we really know a lot about, I would say we are smaller than we are big. But if you want to go down to the Plank length. Very quickly we're bigger than we are small. If you think about strings.

Yeah, string. Exactly. With string theory and so on, that's interesting. But I think like you answer no matter what, we're kind of middle.

Ish. Yeah. I mean, here's something cool. If a human is a neutrino, and again neutrino, the size doesn't really make sense. It's not really a size. But when we talk about some of these neutrinos, I mean, if neutrinos are human, a proton is the sun. So that's like, I mean a proton's real small, like really small. And so yeah, the small gets like crazy small very quickly.

Let's talk about aliens. We already mentioned it. Let's start just by, with the basic. What's your intuition? As of today, this is a thing that could change day by day. But how many alien civilizations out there? Is it zero? Is it a handful? Is it almost endless like the observable universe or the universe is teeming with life?

If I had gun to my head, I have to take a guess. I would say it's teeming with life. I would say there is, I think running a Monte Carlo simulation, this paper by Anders Sandberg and Drexler and a few others a couple years ago, I think you probably know about it. I think the mean, using different, using different running through randomized rake equation multiplication, you ended up with 27 million as the mean of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy in the Milky Way alone. And so then if you go outside the Milky Way, that would turn into trillions. That's the mean. Now what's interesting is that there's a long tail because they believe some of these multipliers in the Drake equation, so for example, the probability that life starts in the first place, they think that the kind of range that we use for that variable is way too small and that's constraining our possibilities. And if you actually extend it to know some, some crazy number of orders of magnitude, like 200, they think should that that variable should be. You get this long tail where I, I forget the exact number, but it's like a third or a quarter of the total outcomes have us alone. Like, you know, I think it's like, I think it's a sizable percentage has us as the only intelligent life in the galaxy, but you can keep going. And I think there's like, you know, a non zero like legitimate amount of outcomes there that have us as the only life in the observable universe at all is on Earth. I mean, seems incredibly counterintuitive. It seems like, you know, you mentioned that people think you're, you know, you must be an idiot because, you know, if you picked up one grain of sand on a beach and examined it and you found all these little things on it, it's like saying, well, maybe this is the only one that has that. And it's like, probably not. They're probably most of the sand, probably, or a lot of the sand. Right.

So.

And then on the other hand, we don't see anything. We don't see any evidence. Which, of course, people would say that the people who still scoff at the concept that we're potentially alone, they say, well, of course, there's lots of reasons we wouldn't have seen anything. And they can go list them and they're very compelling, but we don't know. And the truth is, if this were a freak thing, I mean, if this were a completely freak thing that happened here, whether it's life at all or just getting to this level intelligence, that species, whoever it was, would think there must be lots of us out there, and they'd be wrong. So just being, again, using the same intuition that most people would use, I'd say there's probably lots of other things out there. Yeah.

And you wrote a great blog post about it. But to me, the two interesting reasons that we haven't been in contact, I too have an intuition that the universe is teaming with life. So one interesting is around the Great Filter. So we either. The Great Filter is either behind us or in front of us. So the reason that's interesting is you get to think about what kind of things ensure or ensure the survival of an intelligent civilization or lead to the destruction of intelligent civilization. That's a very pragmatic, very important question to always be asking. And we'll talk about some of those. And then the other one is I'm saddened by the possibility that there could be aliens communicating with us all the time. In fact, they may have visited and we're just too dumb to hear it, to see it. Like the. The idea that the kind of life that can evolve is just the range of life that can evolve is so large that our narrow view of what is life and what is intelligent life is preventing us from having communication with them.

But then they don't seem very smart, because if they were trying to communicate with us, they would surely, if they were super intelligent, they would be very. I'm sure if there's lots of life, we're not that rare. We're not some crazy weird species that hears and has different kinds of ways of perceiving signals. So they would probably be able to, you know, if you really wanted to communicate with an Earth like species, with a human like species, you would send out all kinds of things. You'd send out radio waves and you send out gravity waves and lots of things. So if they're communicating in a way they're trying to communicate with us and it's just we're too dumb to perceive the signals. It's like, well, they're not doing a great job of considering the primitive species we might be. So I don't know. I think if a super intelligent species wanted to get in touch with us and had the capability of, I think probably they would.

Well, they may be getting in touch with us. They're just getting in touch with the thing that we humans are not understanding, that they're getting in touch with us with. I guess that's what I was trying to say is there could be something about Earth that's much more special than us humans, like the nature of the intelligence that's on Earth or the thing that's of value and that's curious and that's complicated and fascinating and beautiful. Might be something that's not just like tweets, okay, Like English language that's interpretable or any kind of language or any kind of signal, whether it's gravity or radio signal that humans seem to appreciate. Why not the actual. It could be the process of evolution itself. There could be something about the way that Earth is breathing essentially through the creation of life and this complex growth of life. It's a whole different way to view organisms and view life that could be getting communicated with. And we humans are just a tiny fingertip on top of that intelligence. And the communication is happening with the main mothership of Earth versus us humans that seem to treat ourselves as super important and we're missing the big picture. I mean, it sounds crazy, but our understanding of what is intelligent, of what is life, what is consciousness, is very limited. And it seems to be. And just being very suspicious, it seems to be awfully human centric. Like this story. It seems like the progress of science is constantly putting humans down on the importance, on the cosmic importance, the ranking of how big we are, how important we are, that that seems to be the more we discover that's what's happening. And I think science is very young. And so I think eventually we might figure out that there's something much, much bigger going on, that humans are just a Curious little side effect of the much bigger thing. That's what I mean that, as I'm saying, it just sounds insane, but.

Well, it just, it sounds a little like religious. It sounds like a spiritual. It gets to that realm where there's something that more than meets the eye.

Well, yeah, but not so religious and spiritual often have this kind of woo woo characteristic like, and people write books about them, then go to wars over whatever the heck is written in those books. I mean, more like it's possible that collective intelligence is more important than individual intelligence. Right. It's the ant colony. What's the primal organism? Is it the ant colony or is it the ant?

Yeah, I mean humans just like, you know, any individual ant can't do shit, but the colony can do these, make these incredible structures and has this intelligence and we're exactly the same. I mean, yeah, you know, you know the famous thing that, you know, no one, no human knows how to make a pencil. Have you heard this? Basically, I mean, this is great. There's not a single human out there has absolutely no idea how to make a pencil. So you have to think about, you have to get the wood, the paint, the different chemicals that make up the yellow paint, the eraser is a whole other thing. The metal has to be mined from somewhere and then the graphite, whatever that is. And there's not one person on earth who knows how to kind of collect all those materials and create a pencil. But together that's child's play. It's one of the easiest things. So the other thing I like to think about, I actually put this as a question on the blog once there's a thought experiment and I actually want to hear what you think. So if a witch, kind of a dickish witch comes around and she says, I'm going to cast a spell on all of humanity and all material things that you've invented are going to disappear all at once. So suddenly we're all standing there naked. There's no buildings, there's no cars and boats and ships and no mines, nothing. Right? It's just the Stone age Earth and a bunch of naked humans. But we're all the same, we have the same brain. So we all know what's going on. And we all got a note from her so we understand the deal. And she says she communicated to every human. Here's the deal. You lost all your stuff. You guys need to make one working iPhone 13 and you make one working iPhone 13 that could pass in the Apple store today in your previous world for an iPhone 13. Then I will restore everything. How long do you think? And so everyone knows this is. This is the mission. We're all aware of the mission. Everyone. All humans. How long would it take us?

That's a really interesting question. So obviously, if you do a random selection of 100 or a thousand humans within the population, I think you're screwed to make that iPhone. I tend to believe that there's fascinating specialization among the human civilization. Like there's a few hackers out there that can like solo build an iPhone.

But with what materials?

So no materials whatsoever. It has to. I mean, it's. It's virtually. I mean, okay, you have to build factories. I mean, to.

Right.

And to fabricate.

Okay, how are you going to mine them? You know, you got to mine the materials where, you know, how many cranes. You don't have any, you know, okay.

You 100 have to have the. This. Everybody's naked.

Everyone's naked, and everyone's where they are. So you and I would currently be naked. It's on the ground in what used to be Manhattan. Grassy. No, grassy island. Yeah.

So you need a naked Elon Musk type character to then start building a company. Yes. You have to have a large company then.

Right. He doesn't even know where he, you know, where is everyone? You know, oh, how am I gonna find other people? I need to.

But we have all the knowledge of.

Yeah, everyone has the knowledge that's in their current brains.

Yeah, I've met some legit engineers, crazy poly math people.

Yeah.

But the actual labor of me. Because you said. Because like the, the original Mac, like the Apple II that could be built.

But even that, you know, even that's gonna be tough. Well, I think part of it is a communication problem. If you could suddenly have, you know, someone. If everyone had a walkie talkie and there was, you know, a couple, you know, 10 really smart people were designated the leaders. They could say, okay, I want, you know, everyone who can do this to. To walk west, you know, until you get to this, this little hub and everyone else, you know, and they could, they could actually coordinate, but we don't have that. So it's like people just, you know. And then what I think about is, so you've got some people that are like, trying to organize and you. You'll have a little community where a couple hundred people have come together and maybe a couple thousand have organized and they designated one person, you know, as the leader, and then they have sub leaders. And okay, we have a start here. We have some organization, you're also going to have some people that say good humans were a scourge upon the earth and this is good. And they're going to try to sabotage. They're going to try to murder the people with the. And who know what they're talking about.

The elite that.

Yeah.

That possess the knowledge.

Well, and so everyone, maybe everyone's hopeful for, you know, we're all civilized and hopeful for the first 30 days or something. And then things start to fall off, you know, people start to lose hope and there's new kinds of, new kinds of governments popping up, you know, new kinds of societies and they're, you know, and they don't play nicely with the other ones. And I think very quickly, I think a lot of people will just give up and say, you know what? This is it. We're back in the Stone Age. Let's just create, you know, agrarian. We don't. Also don't know how to farm. No one knows how to farm. There's like, even the farmers, you know, a lot of them are relying on their machines. And so we also are going to be a mass starvation and that, you know, when you're trying to organize, a lot of people are, you know, coming in with, you know, spears they fashioned and trying to murder everyone who has.

It's an interesting question, given today's society, how much violence would that be? We've gotten softer, less violent and we don't have weapons.

So we have really primitive weapons now.

But we have a. And also we have a kind of ethics where murder is bad. It used to be less like human life was less valued in the past, so murder was more okay, like ethically.

But in the past, they also were really good at figuring out how to have sustenance. They knew how to get food and water because they. So we have no idea. Like, the ancient hunter gatherer societies would laugh at what's going on here. They'd say, you guys, you don't know what you're doing. None of you know what you're doing. Yeah, and also the amount of people feeding this amount of people in a very. In a Stone Age, you know, civilization, that's not going to happen.

So New York and San Francisco are screwed.

Well, whoever's not near water is really screwed. So that's. You're near a river, a freshwater river. And you know, anyway, it's a very interesting question. And what it does this and the pencil, it makes me feel so grateful and like, excited about. Like, man, our civilization is so cool. And this is talk about collective intelligence. Humans did not build any of this. It's collective human. Super collective. Humans is a super intelligent being that can do absolutely. Especially over long periods of time, can do such magical things. And we just get to be born. When I go when I'm working and I'm hungry, I just go click, click, click, and a salad's coming. The salad arrives. If you think about the incredible infrastructure that's in place for that, quickly, just the Internet to the electricity, first of all, that's just powering the things where the amount of structures that have to be created for that electricity to be there. And then you've got, of course, the Internet. And then you have this system where delivery drivers and they're riding bikes that were made by someone else and they're going to get the salad. And all those ingredients came from all over the place. I mean, it's just so. I think it's like, I like thinking about these things because makes me feel like, just so grateful. I'm like, man, it would be so awful if we didn't have this. And people. People who didn't have it would think this was such magic. We live in and we do. And like, cool. That's fun.

Yeah. One of the most amazing things, when I showed up, I came here at 13 from the Soviet Union, and the supermarket was. People don't really realize that, but the. The abundance of food, it's not even. So bananas was the thing I was obsessed about. I just ate bananas every day for many, many months because I haven't had bananas in Russia. And the fact you can have as many bananas as you want, plus they were like somewhat inexpensive relative to the other food. The fact that you can somehow have a system that brings bananas to you without having to wait in long line. All of those things, it's magic.

I mean, also imagine. So first of all, the ancient hunter gatherers, you know, you picture the mother gathering and eating all this fresh food. No. So do you know what an avocado used to look like? It was a little like a sphere.

Yeah.

And the fruit of it, the actual avocado part, was like a little tiny layer around this big pit that took up almost the whole volume. We've this. We've made crazy, like robot avocados today that are nothing to do with, like, what they. So same with bananas. These big sweet, you know, you know, and not infested with bugs. And, you know, they used to eat the shittiest food. And they're eating. And they're eating, you know, uncooked meat or maybe they cook it and they're just, it's, it's gross and it's, things rot. So you go to the supermarket and it's just, it's just a, it's like crazy super engineered cartoon food, fruit and food. And then it's all this processed food which you know, we complain about in our setting. You know we complain about, you know, you need too much process. That's a, this is a good problem. I mean if it's, if you imagine what they would think, oh my God, a cracker, you know how delicious a cracker would taste to them. You know, candy, you know, pasta and spaghetti sauce. They never had anything like this. And then you have from all over the world, I mean things that are grown all over the place, all here in nice little racks, organized and on a middle class salary you can afford anything you want. I mean it's again just like incredible gratitude. Like ah, yeah.

And the question is, how resilient is this whole thing? I mean this is another darker version of your question is if we keep all the material possessions we have, but we start knocking out some percent of the population, how resilient is the system that we built up where we rely on other humans and the knowledge of, built up on the past. The distribute, the, the distributed nature of knowledge. How, how much does it take, how many humans need to disappear for us to be completely lost?

Well, I'm trying to go off one thing which is Elon Musk says that he has this number a million in mind as the order of order of magnitude of people. You need to be on Mars to truly be multi planetary. Yeah, multi planetary doesn't mean, you know, like when Neil Armstrong goes to the moon, they call it a great leap for mankind. It's not a great leap for anything. It is a great achievement for mankind. And I always think about if the first fish to kind of go on land just kind of went up and gave the shore a high five and goes back into the water, that's not a great leap for life, that's a great achievement for that fish. And there should be a little statue of that fish and in the water and everyone should celebrate the fish. But, but we talk about a great leap for life, it's permanent. It's something that now, from now on, this is how things are. So, and this is part of why I get so excited about Mars by the way, is because you can count on one hand like the number of great leaps that we've had. You know, like no life to life and single cell or simple cell to complex cell and single cell organisms to animals to you know, multi cell animals and then ocean to land and then one planet to two planets. Anyway, diversion. But the point is that we are officially that leap for all of life, you know, has happened once the ships could stop coming from Earth because there's some horrible catastrophic World War three and everyone dies on Earth and they're fine and they can turn that certain X number of people into 7 billion, you know, population that's thriving just like Earth. They can build ships that can come back and recolonize Earth because now we are officially multi planetary where it's a self sustaining. He says a million people is about what he thinks. Now that might be a specialized group. That's, that's a very specifically, you know, selected million that has very, very skilled million people. Not just maybe the average million on Earth. But I think it depends what you're talking about. But I don't think you know, so 1 million is 1-7000th, 1-8000th of the current population. I think you need a very, very, very small fraction of humans on Earth to get by. Obviously you're not going to have the same thriving civilization if you get to it. Too small a number, but it depends who you're killing off I guess is part of the question. Yeah, if you killed off half of the people just randomly right now, I think we'd be fine. It would be obviously a great awful tragedy. I think if you killed off three quarters of all people randomly, just three out of every four people drops dead. I think we'd have, obviously the stock market would crash, we'd have a rough patch. But I almost can assure you that this species would be fine.

Well because the million number, like you said, it is specialized. So I think because you have to do this, you have to basically do the iPhone experiment, like literally you have to be able to be able to manufacture computers.

Yeah, everything. If you're going to have the self sustaining, it means you can. Any major important skill, any important piece of kind of infrastructure on Earth can be built there just as well.

It'd be interesting to list out what are the important things, what are the important skills.

Yeah, I mean you have to feed everyone. So you know, mass farming, things like that. You have to, you have to, you have mining these questions. It's like the materials might be, I don't know, I don't know, five mile, two miles underground. I don't know the actual. But like it's amazing to me just that these things got built in the first place. And you know, they never got. No one built the first. The mine that we're getting stuff for the iPhone for probably wasn't built for the iPhone or in general, early mining was for I think, obviously, I assume the industrial revolution when we realized, oh, fossil fuels, we want to extract this magical energy source. I assume that mining took a huge leap without knowing very much about this. I think you need mining, you're going to need a lot of electrical engineers if you're going to have a civilization like ours. Of course you could have oil and lanterns, we could go way back. But if you're trying to build our today thing, you're going to need, you know, energy and electricity and then, and mines that can bring materials and then you're going to need a ton of plumbing and everything that entails.

Yeah, and like you said food, but also the manufacturer. So like turning raw materials into something useful. Yeah, that whole thing like factories, some supply chain transportation.

Right. You know, I mean, you think about, we talk about like world hunger. One of the major problems is, you know, there's plenty of food and by the time it arrives, most of it's gone bad in the truck, you know, in a kind of an impoverished place. So it's like, you know, we take, again, we take it so for granted. All the food in the, in the supermarket is fresh. It's all there. And which always stresses me. If I were running a supermarket, I would always be so like miserable about like things going bad on the shelves or if you don't have enough, that's not good. But if you have too much, it goes bad anyway.

Of course there'll be entertainers too. Like somebody would have a YouTube channel that's running on Mars. There is something different about a civilization on Mars and Earth existing versus like a civilization in the United States versus Russia and China. Like that. That's a different, fundamentally different distance.

Like, yeah, philosophically, will it be like fuzzy? We know there'll be like a reality show on Mars that everyone on Earth is obsessed with. And you know, if I think if people are going back and forth enough, then it becomes fuzzy. It becomes like, oh, our friends on Mars. And there's like this Mars versus Earth, you know, like, you know, and it become like fun tribalism. I think if people don't rarely go back and forth and it really, they're there for. I think it could get kind of like, oh, we hate, you know, a lot of like us versus them stuff going on.

There could be also war in space for territory as first colony Happens China, Russia or whoever, the European, different European nations. Switzerland finally gets their act together and starts wars. Staying out.

Yes. All kinds of crazy geopolitical things that like we have not even, no one's really even thought about too much yet. That, that like, that could get weird. Think about the 1500s when it was suddenly like a race to like, you know, colonize or capture land or just like optimized. Everything has become. Everything is just like really stuck. Mars is a whole new world of like, you know, territory fighting for naming things and you know, and it's a chance for new kind of governments maybe or maybe it's just the colonies of these governments. So we don't get that opportunity. I think it'd be cool if there's new countries being totally new experiments.

That's fascinating because Elon talks exactly about that and I believe that very much that should be from the start. They should determine their own sovereignty. They should determine their own thing.

There was one modern democracy and late 1700s, the U.S. i mean it was the only modern democracy. And now of course there's hundreds or dozens, many dozens. But I think part of the reason that was able to start, I mean it's not that people didn't have the idea. People had the idea it was that it was. They had a clean slate, new place and they suddenly were, you know, so I think it would be a great opportunity to have. There's a lot of people have done that, you know, oh, if I had my own government on an island, my own country, what would I do? And it's. The US Founders actually had the opportunity, that fantasy they were like, we can do it, let's make okay, what's the perfect country? And they tried to make something. Sometimes progress is. It's not held up by our imagination. It's held up by just. There's no, you know, blank canvas to try something on. Yeah.

It's an opportunity for fresh start. You know, the funny thing about the conversation we're having is not often had. I mean even by Elon, he's so focused on starship and actually putting the first human on Mars. I think thinking about this kind of stuff is inspiring. It makes us dream, it makes us hope for the future. So. And it makes us somehow like thinking about civilization on Mars is helping us think about the civilization here on Earth.

Yeah.

How we should run it. What do you think are like in our lifetime, are we going to. I think any effort that goes to Mars, the goal is in this decade. Do you think that's actually going to be achieved.

I have a big bet, $10,000 with a friend when I was drunk in an argument. This is great that the Neil Armstrong of Mars, whoever he or she may be, will set foot by the end of 2030. Now this was probably in 2018 when I had this argument. So like what if a human has to touch Mars by 20 and by the end of 30.

Oh, by the year.

By January 1st, 2031.

Yeah. So did you agree on the time zone or what?

No, no. Yeah. If it's coming on that exact day, that's going to be really stressful. But, but anyway, I think that there will be. That was 2018. I was more confident then. I think it's going to be around this time. I mean, I still won the general bet because his point was, you are crazy. This is not going to happen in our lifetimes or not for many, many decades. And I said, you're wrong. You don't know what's going on in SpaceX. I think if the world depended on it, I think probably SpaceX could probably. I mean, I don't know this, but I think the tech is almost there. Like I don't think, of course it's delayed many years by safety. So they first want to send a ship, you know, around Mars and they want to land a cargo ship on.

Mars and there's the moon on the way too.

Yeah, yeah, there's a lot. But I think the moon a decade before seemed like magical tech that we, that humans didn't have. This is like, no, we can, it's, it's totally conceivable that this seen starship like it's, it is a interplanetary colonial or interplanetary transport like system. That's what they used to call it. SpaceX, the way they do it is every time they do a launch something fails. Usually, you know, when they're testing and they learn a thousand things, the amount of data they get and they improve. So each one has, is, you know, it's like they've moved up like eight generations in each one anyway. So it's not inconceivable that pretty soon they could send a starship to Mars and land it. There's just no good reason. I don't think that they couldn't do that. And so if they could do that, they could in theory send a person to Mars pretty soon now, taking off from Mars and coming back again, I think, I don't think anyone want to be on that voyage today because there's just, you know, it's still amateur hour here getting that perfect. I don't think we're too far away now. The question is. So every 26 months, Earth laps Mars. Right. It's like the sinusoidal soil orbit or whatever it's called, the period 26 months. So it's right now, like in the evens, like 2022 is going to have one of these late 2024. So people could. This was the earliest estimate I heard Elon said maybe we can send people to Mars in 2024 to land in early 2025. That is not going to happen because that included 2022 sending a cargo ship to Mars, maybe even one in 2020. And so I think they're not quite on that schedule. But to win my bet, 2027, I have a chance. And 2029, I have another chance.

Nice.

We're not very good at backing up and seeing the big picture. We're very distracted by what's going on today and what we can believe because it's happening in front of our face. There's no way that humans are going to be landing on Mars and it's not going to be the only thing everyone is talking about. Right. I mean, it's going to. It's going to be the moon landing, but even bigger deal going to another planet. Right. And for it to start a colony, not just to high five and come back. So this is like the 2000s. Maybe the 2000s is going to be the new 1960s. We're going to have a space decade. I'm so excited about it. And it's again, it's one of the great leaps for all of life happening in our lifetimes.

Like, that's wild to paint a slightly cynical possibility which I don't see happening. But I just want to put sort of value into leadership. I think it wasn't obvious that the moon landing would be so exciting for all of human civilization. Some of that have to do with the right speeches with the space race. Like, space, depending on how it's presented, can be boring. I don't, I don't. I don't think it's been that so.

Far, but I've actually, I think space is quite boring right now. SpaceX is super big, but like 10 years ago, space. Yeah, some writer, I forget who wrote, it's like the best magic trick in the show happened at the beginning. And now they're starting to do this, like, easy hazard. It's like you can't go in that direction. And the line that this writer said is like watching astronauts Go up to the space station after watching the moon is like watching Columbus sail to Ibiza. It's just like, you know, everything is so practical. You're going up to the space station not to explore, but to do science experiments in microgravity. And you're sending rockets up, you know, not, you know, mostly here and there there's a probe, but mostly you're sending up to put satellites to, you know, for, for DirecTV, you know, or whatever it is. It's kind of like lame Earth industry, you know, usage. So I agree with you. Space is boring there. The, the, the setting foot on Mars, that's gotta be a crazy global event. I can't imagine it not being, Maybe you're right, maybe I'm taking for granted the speeches and the space race and that.

I think the value of, I guess what I'm pushing is the value of people like Elon Musk and potentially other leaders that hopefully step up is extremely important here. Like I would argue without the publicity of SpaceX, it's not just the ingenuity of SpaceX but like what they've done publicly by having a figure that tweets and all that kind of stuff like that, that, that's a source of inspiration NASA wasn't able to quite pull off with a shuttle.

That's one of his two reasons for doing this. SpaceX exists for two reasons. One, life insurance for the species. If we're, you know, if you're, if you're, if you're, I always think about this way, if you're an alien on some faraway planet and you're rooting against humanity and you win the bet if humanity goes extinct, you do not like SpaceX. You do not want them to have their eggs in two baskets. Now. Yeah, you know, sure, it's like obviously this, you know, you could have some, you know, something that kills everyone on both planets, some AI war or something. But, but the point is obviously it's good for our chances, our long term chances to be having, you know, to self sustaining civilizations going on. The second reason he's in, he's, he values this I think just as high is it's the greatest adventure in history, you know, going multi planetary and that, you know, it's, you know, people need some reason to wake up in the morning and it'll just be this hopefully great uniting event too. I mean, I'm sure in today's nasty, awful political environment, which is like a whirlpool of that sucks everything into it, so doesn't mean you name a thing and it's become a nasty political topic. So I hope, I hope that space can, you know, Mars can just bring everyone together but you know, it could become this hideous thing where it's, you know, oh, you know, billionaire, some annoying storyline gets built. So half the people think that anyone who's excited about Mars is an evil, you know, something.

Yeah.

Anyway, I hope it is super exciting.

So far space has been a uniting, inspiring thing and in fact especially during this time of a pandemic has been just commercial entity. Putting out humans into space for the first time was just one of the only big sources of hope.

Totally. And awe. Just like watching this huge skyscraper go up in the air, flip over, come back down and land. I mean it just makes everyone just want to sit back and clap and kind of like the way I look at something like SpaceX is it makes me proud to be a human and I think it makes a lot of people feel that way. It's like good for our self esteem. It's like, you know what, we're pretty, you know, we have a lot of problems but like we're kind of awesome.

Yeah, we're awesome.

And if we can put people on Mars, you know, sticking a, an Earth flag on Mars, like damn, we should be so proud of our little family here. We did something cool. And by the way, I've made it clear to SpaceX people, including Elon many times and it's like once a year reminder that if they want to make this more exciting, they send the writer to Mars on the thing and I'll blog about it. So I'm just continuing to throw this out there on which I'm trying to get them to send me to Mars.

No, I understand that. So I just want to clarify on which trip does the writer want to go?

I think my dream one to be honest would be like the, you know, like the Apollo 8 where they just looped around the moon and came back. Because landing on Mars give you a.

Lot of good content to write about.

Great content, right? I mean the amount of kind of high minded, you know. And so I would go into the thing and I would blog about it and I'd be in microgravity so I'd be bouncing around my little space. I get a little, they can just send me in a dragon, they don't need to do a whole starship. And I would bounce around and I would get to. And I've always had a dream of going to one of those nice jails for a year because I just have nothing to do besides read books and no responsibilities and no social plan. So this is the ultimate version of that. Anyway, it's a side topic, but I think it would be.

But also if you. I mean, to be honest, if you land on Mars, that's epic. And then if you die there, finishing your writing, it will be just even that much more powerful for the. For the impact.

Yeah, but then. But then I'm gone and I don't even get to like, experience the publication of it, which is the whole point.

Well, some of the greatest writers in history didn't get a chance to experience the publication of their. I know.

I. I don't really think that. I think like, I think back to Jesus and I'm like, oh, man, that guy really, like, crushed it, you know? But then if you think about doesn't, like, you could literally die today and then become the Next Jesus, like 2000 years from now in this civilization that's like, they're, you know, they're like in magical. In the clouds and, and they're worshiping you. They're worshiping Lex. And like, that sounds like your ego probably would be like, wow, that's pretty cool. Except it's irrelevant to you because you never even knew it happened.

This feels like a Rick and Morty episode.

It does, it does.

Okay. You've talked to Elon quite a bit. You've written about him quite a bit. Just, it'd be cool to hear you talk about what are your ideas of what, you know, the magic sauces you've written about with Elon, what makes him so successful, his style of thinking, his ambition, his dreams, his. The people he connects with, the kind of problems he tackles. Is there kind of comments you can make about what makes him special?

I think that obviously there's a lot of things that he's very good at. He has, He's. He has. He's obviously super intelligent. His heart is very much in, like, I think the right place. Like, and, you know, I really, really believe that. Like, and I think people can sense that, you know, he just doesn't seem like a grifter of any kind. He's truly trying to do these big things for the right reasons. And he's obviously crazy, ambitious and hardworking. Right. Not everyone is. Some people are as talented and have cool visions, but they just don't want to spend their life that way. So. But that's. None of those alone is what makes Elon Elon. I mean, if it were, there'd be more of him because there's a lot of People that are very smart and smart enough to accumulate a lot of money and influence, and they have great ambition and they have, you know, their hearts in the right place. To me it is. The very unusual quality he has is that he's sane in a way that almost every human is crazy. What I mean by that is we are programmed to trust conventional wisdom over our own reasoning for good reason. If you go back 50,000 years and conventional wisdom says, don't eat that berry, you know, or this is the way you tire, tie a spearhead to a spear and you're thinking, I'm smarter than that. Like you're not. You know, that comes from the accumulation of life experience, accumulation of observation and experience over many generations. And that's a little mini version of the collective super intelligence. It's like, you know, equivalent of like making a pencil today. Like, people back then, like the conventional wisdom, like, had this super, this, this knowledge that no human could ever accumulate. So we're very wired to trust it. Plus, the secondary thing is that the people who just say they believe the mountain, they worship the mountain is their God, right? And the mountain determines their fate. That's not true. Right. And the conventional wisdom is wrong there. But believing it was helpful to survival because you were part of the crowd and you stayed in the tribe, and if you started to insult the mountain God and say, that's just a mountain, it's not, you didn't fare very well, right? So for a lot of reasons, it was a great survival trait to just trust what other people said and believe it. And truly, obviously, the more you really believed it, the better. Today, conventional wisdom in a rapidly changing world and a huge giant society, our brains are not built to understand that they have a few settings and none of them is 300 million person society. So your brain is basically is treating a lot of things like a small tribe, even though they're not. And they're treating conventional wisdom as very wise in a way that it's not. If you think about it this way, it's like picture like a bucket that's not moving very much, moving like a millimeter a year. And so it has time to collect a lot of water in it. That's like conventional wisdom in the old days when very few things change. Like your 10 great great great grandmother probably lived a similar life to you, maybe on the same piece of land. And so old people really knew what they were talking about. Today, the bucket's moving really quickly. And so, you know, the wisdom doesn't accumulate, but we think it does because our brain settings doesn't have the oh, quickly moving bucket setting on it. So my grandmother gives me advice all the time and I have to decide, is this. So there are certain things that are not changing, like relationships and love and loyalty and things like this. Her advice on those things, I'll listen to it all day. She's one of the people who said, you got to live near your people you love, live near your family. Right. I think that is like tremendous wisdom, right? That is wisdom because that happens to be something that hasn't. Doesn't change from generation to generation.

For now, right?

She all right. For now. She's also telling, right. So I'll be the idiot telling my grandson they'll actually be in the metaverse, like, exactly, it doesn't matter. And I'm like, you have to. It's not the same when you're not in person. They're going to say it is exactly the same. And they'll also be thinking to me with their neural link and I'm going to be like, slow down, I don't understand what you're saying. You just talk like a normal person. Anyway, so my grandmother then. But then she says, I don't know about this writing you're doing. You should go to law school and you want to be secure. And that's not good advice for me, given the world I'm in and what I like to do and what I'm good at. That's not the right advice because the world is totally. She's in a different world. So she became wise for a world that's no longer here right now, if you think about that. So then when we think about conventional wisdom, it's a little like my grandmother and there's a lot of no, it's not maybe, you know, 60 years outdated like her software. It's maybe 10 years outdated conventional wisdom, sometimes 20. So anyway, I think that we all continually don't have the confidence in our own reasoning when it conflicts with what everyone else thinks, when. With what seems right. We don't have the guts to act on that reasoning for that reason. Right. You know, we. And so so many elon examples. I mean, just from the beginning, building Zip2 was the first company and it was Internet advertising at the time when people said this Internet was brand new kind of thinking of the metaverse, VR metaverse today. And people be like, oh, we facilitate Internet advertising. People are saying, yeah, people are going to advertise on the Internet. Yeah, right. But actually it wasn't that he's Magical and saw the future. It's that he looked at the present, looked at what the Internet was, thought about the obvious advertising opportunity this was going to be. It wasn't rocket science, it wasn't genius. I don't believe. I think it was just seeing the truth. And when everyone else is laughing, saying, well you're wrong. I mean I did the math and here it is right next company, you know, X.com which became eventually PayPal, people said, oh yeah, people are going to put their financial information on the Internet. No way. To us it seems so obvious. If you went back then you would probably feel the same way. You'd think this is, that is a, that is a fake company, that no, it's just obviously not a good idea. He looked around and said, you know, I see where this is. And so again he could see where it was going because he could see what it was that day and not what it, you know, not people. Conventional wisdom was still a bunch of years earlier. SpaceX is the ultimate example. A friend of his apparently bought, actually compiled a montage, video montage of rockets blowing up to show him this is not a good idea. And if, but just even the bigger picture, the amount of billionaires who have like thought this was, I'm going to start launching rockets. And you know, the amount that failed, I mean, it's not conventional wisdom said this isn't a bad endeavor. He was putting all of his money into it. Yeah, landing rockets was another thing, you know, well, if, you know, here's the classic kind of way we are re reason which is if this could be done, NASA would have done it a long time ago because of the money it would save. This could be done. The Soviet Union would have done it back in the 60s. It's obviously something that can't be done. And the math on his envelope said, well, I think it can be done. And so he just did it. So in each of these cases, I think actually in some ways Elon gets too much credit as, you know, people think it's that his Einstein intelligence or he can see the future. He has incredible guts. He's so courageous. I think if you actually are looking at reality and you're just assessing probabilities and you're ignoring all the noise, which is wrong. So wrong. Right. And you just, then you just have to be pretty smart and pretty courageous and you have to have this magical ability to be sane and trust your reasoning over conventional wisdom because your individual reasoning part of it is that we see that we can't build a pencil. We can't build this civilization on our own. So we kind of tout to the collective for good reason. But this is different when it comes to what's possible. You know, the Beatles were doing their kind of motowny chord patterns in the early 60s, and they were doing what was normal. They were doing what was clearly, this kind of sound is a hit. Then they started getting weird because they were so popular. They had this confidence to say, let's just. We're going to start just experimenting. And it turns out that, like, if you all these people are in this, like one groove together doing music, and it's just like, there's a lot of land over there. And it seems like, you know, I'm sure the managers would say, and that the. All the record execs would say, no, you have to be here. This is what sells. And it's just not true. So I think that Elon is the term for this, that actually Elon likes to use is reasoning from first principles. The physics term first principles are your axioms. Physicists, they don't say, well, what do people think? No, they say, what are the axioms? Those are the puzzle pieces. Let's use those to build a conclusion. That's our hypothesis now let's test it. Right? And they come up with all kinds of new things constantly by doing that. If Einstein was assuming conventional wisdom is right, he never would have even tried to create something that really disproved Newton's laws. And the other way to reason is reasoning by analogy, which is.